The authentication of original documents has become a vital aspect of business, government, and other security sensitive areas. With the continuous use, re-use, and re-purposing of documents in electronic form, original documents in paper form can often be vital in proving the origin of various derivative documents. Such authentication has become particularly important as a result of the widespread availability of high quality, relatively inexpensive scanners, photo printers, and image editing software. It takes little skill for a counterfeiter to scan a document, edit the resulting image to suit a particular need, and print a copy. It has thus become trivial for counterfeiters to recreate original documents, and to produce copies that are nearly indistinguishable from the originals.
In many cases, original documents are required to prove ownership or authority. The trivial nature of copying documents can place valuable assets and rights at risk. In other cases, copies may be allowable as long as the distinction between the copies and the originals can be unequivocally maintained.
As such, it would be beneficial to provide a method for increasing the difficulty of producing counterfeited documents, especially for those criminals that lack a high level of technological expertise. Additionally, by increasing the level of counterfeiting difficulty, it is hoped that even highly skilled criminals will lack the resources to create illicit documents.